Do lockdown dates and data even matter when we're doing what we want anyway?
Feelings are not facts. This is something that is said in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). It is said by group leaders in AA meetings. It derives, some say, from the man who founded CBT, Dr Aaron Beck, as a way of talking about what he calls emotional reasoning. We all do this. We go with our gut feelings as if they are indeed facts; we tell ourselves that our feelings do not lie even when those feelings actually keep making us unhappy. Right now everyone is living in this in-between state, ignoring some feelings, trusting others, being driven quite mad by the data as it is called. Most of us are not in any way qualified to understand data, so we do as we are told. That said, I dont really know anyone who truly knows what all the current rules are and really observes them. In some places lockdown seems well and truly over because people have decided it is and are doing very much what they like. Yet other people seem so full of re-entry anxiety that they are keeping themselves locked down whatever happens. Freedom Day, the fourth and apparently last bit of the roadmap, may or may not be delayed. The transmissibility of the new variant is the issue. God only knows. I am now double jabbed but I live with three unvaccinated people. My confidence waxes and wanes about how safe anything ever is. The restaurants I have been in have been lovely, but dont seem to be particularly distanced, nor the pubs. Cinemas still somehow dont feel right to me because I have internalised the mantra that outside is safe and inside is dangerous. Now my youngest is back from college there are more and more young people in my house and its lovely. For all the big political arguments about June 21 and the economic ones about the effect on hospitality, the rest of us are faced with these small personal decisions and rules that make little sense. I got told off for walking the wrong way round a supermarket the other day because I had forgotten something. A black-cab driver got very annoyed with me when I asked why he was not wearing a mask. The table service apps in pubs so often do not work that you end up going to the bar anyway. You may or may not remember to wear a mask as you do. All kinds of interactions are subject to Covid rules that its impossible to understand. I can go to a dental hygienist or get a massage in a small unventilated space. Not going to a nightclub does not bother those my age, but not being able to travel really, really does. Wanting to be elsewhere is not selfish or privileged; its merely human. Sure, I can afford to wait a few more weeks as people like David King tell us that cases are on the rise and we need to get as many people vaccinated as possible. For the first time ever Johnson has to at least appear cautious. I have become so confused and semi-institutionalised I share that caution. How adaptable we have all been, but this adaptability has come at a price. For some the ultimate price, for others hard economic struggle and for many this low-level hum of anxiety. Most people have tried to do the right thing but right now the right thing is almost impossible to understand. Those distressed families trying to fly back from Faro are not evil. There is fear of stoking a two- tier society, the jabbed and the unjabbed, but those tiers already exist  older people and younger people  and many will take all this into their own hands whatever the Government decides. Is it not in fact unofficial Government policy that we will take risks and if we wind up ill, well then we can be blamed and not them. Knowledge is meant to be power but we are caught between the two. We dont know. They dont know and yet we are meant to feel our way back to normality. The truth is we cannot go back to exactly how things were before the virus because this is a global pandemic. No man is an island. No island is simply an island. The protective layers we have wrapped ourselves in are a mixture of the rational and the irrational. Freedom does not have an exact date on it because freedom is a practice. Many are already practising it by refusing to live in fear. I am not there yet, but surely that time will come whatever the Government says.