From Lockdown to Tier 3. Plus ça change

To no one’s surprise, least of all mine, South Gloucestershire leaves ‘lockdown’ next week and moves into Tier 3. It’s going to be so much better than the national lockdown. Just look at the things we will be able to do that we weren’t before:

• Go shopping
• Visit the gym
• Play outdoor sports (such an attractive prospect in December)
• Er…
• That’s it

So, the big change for me is that I can play a round of golf, always assuming I can find someone mad enough to come out with me. Everything else is going to stay exactly the same. I’ll be working, pretty well as normal, I’ll be buying odds and sods from my local supermarket and I’ll resume the remorseless road to madness now my latest mental health therapy is at an end.

I watched Matt Hancock’s near daily House of Commons announcement with the usual sense of foreboding and inevitability. Alongside a dishevelled prime minister, Hancock went through the formalities. The disease has gone away, this is not the time to get pissed and start shagging everyone you meet (he may have used slightly different wording) but there’s definitely jam tomorrow, even if thanks to Rishi Sunak’s latest public spending announcement we won’t be able to afford to buy any. Hancock thanked us all for our incredible efforts in following the rules, hoping that it wouldn’t occur to us that there was next to sod all we can do anyway, given that most things are shut down. If things were open, I can assure Matt that we’d all be out there helping to spread the virus. I’m not one of those libertarians who would wish to end all restrictions and allow the virus to have some kind of perverse Darwinian effect where only the strong, and the lucky, survive: I’m just totally worn down with it.

The good news is that COVID-19, along with the rest of us, will be taking a break this Christmas. Why else would Johnson announce that we could have five days of mingling with relatives and maybe even friends over the festive period? Presumably, there is no scientific evidence that says ending the ‘lockdown’ for a brief period will cause any harm? In any event, I am grateful to Johnson for telling me the new rules. I’ll certainly bear them in mind as I plan my Christmas.

Like you, I suspect, I’ve had enough of COVID-19 and the government’s woeful handling of it. The vaccine should give me hope, but we don’t yet know when it will be approved and for how long it will be effective. As things stand, I just see months and months of misery ahead, a dark tunnel from which the only light comes from an oncoming express.