Read the rest of my Corona Lockdown diaries here.
This week has just flown by; as such I’ve not really kept on top of this ‘diary’ thing and I may have missed a week.
I meant to write about my joy at being back in restaurants and pubs, but was in fact too busy enjoying the restaurants and pubs to write it.
Since they opened just over a week ago, I’ve eaten out four times. Once at a nice fancy seafood restaurant to pop my cherry in style, twice with my kids in the pub, and once with friends in the pub.
I know many people were, and are, quite against the pubs reopening.
I have absolutely loved being able to sit in a pub garden and enjoy myself with friends and family, eat food I haven’t cooked, and order drinks selected from a cocktail menu.
The only things I haven’t enjoyed are other people being ever so slightly irresponsible shitheads. There are such people everywhere, in every walk of life, so it is hardly a surprise that I have come across some in my four visits.
I’ve witnessed parents telling their children to ‘run off and play’ so they could drink in peace – seemingly not caring too much if their potentially plague-carrying offspring veered towards other people’s tables.
I’ve seen a large group of 20-30 people gathering to merge tables (which are not able to be booked for groups of more than six), getting progressively more and more drunk, observing mere inches of distance instead of the recommended two metres and generally being loud and obnoxious dickheads. This isn’t OK (and it will get you told off by the poor pub staff who are busy AF).
But they were definitely in the minority.
Fortunately most people seem to be quite happy to play by the new rules, and nobody has encroached on my own space which would probably have made me fairly nervous and angry. I’ve felt quite safe everywhere we’ve gone; I would happily recommend it over a trip to Aldi.
It’s nice to pretend for a bit that things are back to normal.
I know that they aren’t, that people are still dying and that the risk of spreading COVID-19 is still very clear and present, but I am exhausted and bored and being able to go out has lifted me in a way I had forgotten was possible.
I reason that long as I remember to keep my distance, to wash my hands, to sanitise, not to lick strangers and to watch my kids closely and stop them doing the same, then I am minimising the risk and that feels good enough for me.
Don’t worry: This doesn’t mean that somehow the government have won me over. Quite the opposite.
I’m just so done with being angry and upset.
I have been actively avoiding the news which so enraged me through the first ten shambolic weeks in order to keep a sense of of mental equilibrium, and it is working.
Yes, the entire cabinet are still monstrous gaslighting c*nts and just thinking about how they treat us all like idiot plebs so we are confused and then blame each other instead of them, and then promising to hand us all a ten quid voucher (when you match it with your own money, Monday-Wednesday, eating in, terms and conditions apply) as if we should be grateful has made me angry all over again.
So, I refuse to do it to myself if I can help it. I’m looking away from the car crash for a while.
Ignorance is quite close to bliss.
Even closer to bliss is ignorance, and a nice French Martini, made by a bartender and brought to me in a sunny pub garden where everyone is maintaining a good distance.