The Fear

I have the fear again.

You have probably read this and agreed. You are still afraid of catching the virus. There is a lot of fear out there created by the government, who wanted us to stay indoors, so that our fragile health system didn’t collapse. Now that they want us to start going out and about again they’ve forgotten to reassure us that the risk is slight, or down, or never as bad as they made out in the first place. They could have started to publish recovery rates, or details of how the R rate was under 0.5 (unfortunately, I don’t think it is). They want to get the economy going again, which is a good thing. We have to get back to normal at some point and doing it gradually makes sense.

For me, it’s not the idea of trying to get back to normal that is frightening.

It’s the idea that it’s just common sense.

Again, lots of you are agreeing. You are thinking that you have common sense but your neighbour doesn’t.

This is what frightens me.

There is no such thing as common sense. We all have our own interpretation of what is sensible in any given situation. I have friends who think it is sensible to sleep in a tent for a holiday and I can’t think of anything less restful.

This matters now though because there are consequences to not following the rules. Police have powers to stop and even fine you for doing the wrong thing. Laws need to be very clearly defined for the protection of everyone. Police shouldn’t be asked to use common sense when applying them.

Even the cabinet aren’t clear on the interpretation of the new rules and if the people who have made them don’t understand them then saying we need to apply common sense is just ridiculous.

Even worse than the legal aspect, is the fact that we are all so keen on policing each other. We live in a world where we are constantly exposed to public shaming. If you take a selfie on the beach and post it on your Instagram page some people will think it wasn’t common sense to be on that particular beach and there will be anger and fear thrown at you.

I was thinking about the rule on meeting people and realised that depending on how it is interpreted it would be too easy to break. The government are confused about this. First they said you could meet your mum and dad outside, providing you stayed socially distant then they said you couldn’t meet both.

At the weekend, I dropped a piece of cake to my sister. I put it in a Tupperware box, left it on the doorstep, rang the bell and walked away (a walk-by-cake-ing). It was on my daily walk, which I was taking with my daughter and the Long Suffering Husband. My sister wasn’t in but as we walked away from her house she was on her way home. So we stopped and chatted for a little while in a socially distanced way (except her dog, who launched herself at me. Dogs feel they’ve been abandoned by people they love but don’t live with). This was before the new rules and common sense told us that there was nothing wrong with this. However, now the government has clarified the situation it turns out that my sister was breaking the rules. Obviously, I did nothing wrong. I was with my family and I met one person but she met three! How irresponsible! You see how ridiculous common sense is?

So, I have the fear that we are about to enter a phase where confused, frightened, angry people are all shouting at each other.

It’s not surprising that all of this is happening in the Japanese micro season of mimizu izuru (worms surface.)

Yesterday, was a sad day for me anyway and Nigel died too.

Nigel and Nellie in the Gardener’s World Garden.