A friend, a senior retired mandarin, emails. He complains that rural lockdown means that he and his wife have ‘got out of the habit of making even the simplest decisions’. I know exactly what he means, and I suspect the problem is more widespread than the shires. The capacity to decide is like a muscle: if it is not exercised, it quickly atrophies. This may explain why some people are so querulous at the suggestion of Boris Johnson that they should now, given the declining rate of infection and death from Covid-19, decide whether to go back to work. They complain of ‘mixed messaging’, instead of the clear earlier instruction to stay at home. But the messages of normal life are mixed, and rightly so. One has to decide whether to spend more or less time with one’s family, whether to borrow a lot or a little to buy a house, whether to do something dangerous, such as motorcycle racing, or safer, such as crochet, and so on. As glimmers of normality return, one has to balance the need to work against the risk of infection, a risk which will not be the same for everyone. This capacity to choose is otherwise described as freedom. Sir Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon seem to be setting their faces against freedom. Surely most people will be sensible and welcome the chance to make up their own minds. It is not usually a compliment, in Britain, to call someone a ‘stay-at-home’. If it’s the workers vs the ‘stay-at-homes’, surely the workers will win. If I am wrong, there is no obvious reason why the country can ever recover.
A sad side-effect of the Covid lockdown is the threatened closure of the Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas’ Hospital (whose ICU recently nursed the Prime Minister back to health).
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