Is the handshake ready to bow out?

Freemasons beware – the traditional handshake may be the latest victim of the coronavirus, cancelled in our post-pandemic quest for a sanitised contactless future.

According to testimony before the science and technology select committee, in the interests of public health, the good old-fashioned grip and grin should be replaced with the chaste but benign Japanese tradition of bowing.

Baron Peter Piot, a professor of microbiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told peers that ‘handshakes are probably out forever’ before citing socially distanced cultural greetings, such as bowing, as more suitable alternatives.

Piot was probably inspired by his own experiences of Japan, with which he has a long connection. He received of the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan’s equivalent of a knighthood) in 2018, an occasion when the deepest bow would have been appropriate.

In his testimony, Piot speculates that contactless greetings, such as the bow, may have developed as a means of avoiding pandemics, which makes you wonder why this didn’t happen in a Europe with its long history of plague and pestilence.