For lovers who live apart, it’s been a long year

Spring is coming, the roadmap out of lockdown is here, and the faint signs of an End To All This can be seen, in smoke rings, on the horizon. I scan the list of freedoms with impatience: schools, if you must, parental visits in parks, fine, fine, but when will I get to see my girlfriend indoors?

If you express some level of frustration with lockdown life, the worry is that you will be taken for someone who believes the right to spread plague is enshrined in the Magna Carta or that society took a wrong turn with the suspiciously foreign antics of Louis Pasteur. I am keen neither to catch Covid nor give it to others. That said, it has been illegal for me to hug my girlfriend since March and I’m starting to go mad.

Just before the Nicer Lockdown last year, the one where we made exciting breads and doggedly stuck to our daily exercise regimes, Matt Hancock suggested that couples who had not yet moved in together might want to consider doing so in a hurry. Leaving aside that, at this point, there was a week left to arrange it, there was also a vague feeling that all this would be over soon. Stoicism and self-denial would see us through.

My girlfriend and I — in our forties and thirties respectively — both continued to live in rented houses in Leicester with comparative strangers. We waited for the day we might be allowed to visit one another. Bubbles were out of the question, as both of us had housemates and indoor mixing was banned. Pub visits, trips to the shopping centre, office life: all were permitted and then abandoned.