Since lockdown rules eased my mates have already grown tired of seeing me: I’ve been liberal with my socialising, but there’s no way I’m going anywhere near my elderly parents.
I doubt this is news to other extroverts, but being stuck indoors during ultra lockdown (that’s what I’ve called the pre-seeing-friends period of lockdown), was a confronting, alienating experience.
That’s not to say it was all bad. Some of it was good: ultra lockdown, for instance, was good for introspection, and good for learning new things about myself. For instance, I learnt that I can actually enjoy nights in! (Even if I now find them a struggle again with the welcome option of seeing friends back on the agenda.)
But what ultra lockdown wasn’t was natural or comfortable.
So along with my cohort of energised extrovert friends, I was relieved to see pals in parks for beers and snacks in what felt like a new age of socialising when rules were eased: why wasn’t innocently lying in parks something we were doing much more of in life before lockdown? Why did we have to wait for this horrid situation to do it?
Since lockdown eased, I have leapt about the East End, sometimes going into central to gabble to mates most nights, revelling in the simple freedoms of a socially distant walk – and now that guidelines say we can see six people outdoors, including our parents, surely it’s time to finally visit my 77 and 78-year-old parents and gabble at them too.
After all, the government has told us via some complicated messages about R rates that we are allowed to visit friends and family of all ages, but given the mixed-messaging that has defined the lockdown, and the commonly-held fear that the Conservative government has economics as a priority over fundamental safety (remember herd mentality?) what makes us all so sure that visiting the weakest in society – those over 70 – is suddenly a superb idea?
In short, much like when Boris Johnson proudly declared: “I’ve been shaking hands with everybody!” and then contracted coronavirus, just because he has said we are now safe to visit our elderly relatives doesn’t mean it is safe to actually do so.
The scientific facts paint the picture of a virus still deeply embedded in Britain, and spreading fast. There are still more than 1,500 new daily cases a day in the UK as it stands; at the height of lockdown it was around 4,000.
Despite the worrying rate of new daily cases, I’ve struggled with how the people around me are conflating the government’s message of safety with the absolute truth of the situation. “I’ve learned that I’m more authoritarian than I thought,” one friend reflected to me recently of how he has awaited the government messaging to plan his social life.
But how can we be expected to believe the government has our best interests at heart when chief strategist Dominic Cummings isn’t abiding by his own rules, and the UK has the second highest coronavirus death rate in the world, despite our wealth as a country?
They are obvious points, but fundamental reasons why, unfortunately, we have to employ our own common sense, rather than abiding literally by governmental rules when it comes to seeing the weakest in society.
I feel stressed when my parents, nearly 80, texted me a simple: “We’re allowed to see each other now!” I feel stressed about it because it makes me feel like I’m disinterested if I don’t go to see them, and I feel like I’m patronising them if I try to explain why I think it’s a worse idea than literally licking my own toilet door handle.
“For me, picnicking with the visibly vulnerable is a socially distant spread too far.”
The crux of it, as Twitter discussions have exposed, is that for some, we’ll continue to be wary. We’ll know, given the obvious stats around the situation, that visiting elderly relatives – especially if they live in the countryside and you live in an urban centre – is still objectively dangerous.
For those of us that get the danger, our biggest stresses may be communicating our fears, badly, to those who just desperately want to see us.
As Prime Minister Boris Johnson put it when he announced the easing of rules over seeing friends and family: “I know that for many this will be a long-awaited and joyful moment.”
But my biggest fear derives from the thought that there are others who will take the government’s advice literally. Others who, in good faith, will enjoy picnics in parks with elderly relatives in the days after they have joyously shared park spaces with multiple friends in urban centres where the silent, invisible virus statistically lurks hard.
To be clear, I definitely am somewhat of a hypocrite for seeing my friends as I have, putting myself, and my friends, at risk. Even if we are young-ish. I accept that response wholeheartedly.
But for me, visiting an elderly relative is so much more destructive and needless, given the facts around mortality rates for the over-70s. (My friends with known underlying health conditions have sensibly, voluntarily bowed out from social situations these past few picnic-filled weeks.)
I fear there will be more unnecessary deaths spread by more asymptomatic young people carrying the virus to their elderly relatives because of this easing of lockdown.
We may all be putting each other more at risk now we’re picnicking more but, for me, picnicking with the visibly vulnerable is a socially distant spread too far.
Adam Bloodworth is a reporter at HuffPost UK