August 18

I am completely fascinated by the difference in risk-assessment conclusions reached by different groups of people.

Forget the Government guidelines (Most people have anyway – not one customer wearing a mask in Pret- A – Manger today and barely a foot between Soho’s outside restaurant tables, let alone 1.5 metres. Restaurants where the staff are masked are like hen’s teeth and joggers in the park are still pounding up and breathing moistly into one’s face.) By and large, the young are behaving as though there is no virus but for we who still consider there is danger to be avoided, the difference in the level and type of risk we are prepared to take is not only marked but completely illogical.

For example:

I’ve judged it too risky to go for my eye test or to the dentist, though”The Writer” and I have each been to a GP and a specialist. The GP is unmasked and ungloved, the specialist wears a valved mask, gloves and an apron, takes temperatures at the door of his consulting room and asks his patients also to wear a mask and gloves. We have eaten in a few restaurants but won’t go to one where the staff are not masked. We won’t eat indoors (except once when it rained mid-meal) and we shop for odd items while all major shopping is still delivered and sanitised by us before being allowed through the front door. We would not board a ‘plane and have, so far, avoided taxis, buses and trains.

One couple of friends, horrified at our temerity at eating out and doing the odd bit of shopping , cheerfully boarded a ‘plane to Greece this week, as did another who is diabetic.

One friend has shopped throughout and went by Uber to friends for a birthday lunch at the height of the infection. (The friends had had it but as far as was known, the driver hadn’t).

One friend who had been locked down even more severely than us is now shopping and his wife ,who has not been out since March, recently took the bus and had her hair done, which we have resolutely held out against – to the point where “the writer’s” hair would look quite fetching in a ponytail.

We are still sanitising letters and leaving the cardboard from parcels outside the front door ,while other friends open mail without fear as soon as it drops through the letterbox.

One friend wrote to me scathingly about people who don’t open their front door to greet hardworking delivery people. I had to admit to being one of them, except in the case of Waitrose who demand to see my face in order to gauge whether I am under age for wine deliveries.

We have risked only socially -distanced pic-nics in the park while other friends have had guests for dinner indoors, at either end of the dining room table.

We haven’t attended a single cultural event or cinema, whereas others are enthusiastically visiting art galleries and museums weekly, revelling in their relative emptiness.

We have had pizzas delivered and eaten them out of the unsanitised cardboard boxes at the same time as carefully disinfecting all fruit before it goes into the fridge.

When I began this blog, I compared us all to Alice falling down the rabbit hole – and life does seem to become more illogical every day. The myriad small decisions to be made are exhausting and far more stressful than being locked down. It’s also a battle to hold onto one’s sanity when all around are people in whom we have reposed our trust, making and re-making and un-making insane decisions

It seems to me that we are all developing complex systems by which to live, unique to each individual or household, which combine a modicum of scientific information with a hefty dose of magical thinking. And maybe we are all doomed hold our own particular rituals sacred until there is a good treatment or a vaccine. Or maybe we’ll get bored and, like the young, stop bothering, though that seems unlikely.

All I can say with absolute certainty is that none of us has so far travelled, or has plans to travel, anywhere by car in order to test our eyesight.